Monday, June 12, 2017

Bloody Hell

We just returned from two weeks in the States, but that will have to wait because I now find myself, for the fourth time in less than a year, having to roll out this caveat:

This is not a political blog, but today I am going to talk about politics.


The reason (this time): I have just landed in a country without a government.

For the second time in less than a year, the British political system is in melt-down because they called an election they did not need to call and got a result they could not imagine happening.

Bloody hell!

For my American friends, this is the long and the short of it.

After Brexit, Ms May, our new Prime Minister, set herself up as a “Strong and Stable” leader who would spearhead the charge into Brexit, confident of the WILL OF THE PEOPLE and secure the HARD BREXIT she knew we all wanted.

She said from the get-go that she was not going to hold an election. She had a majority, she knew the people were behind her. It was time to get on with the job.

But then, while walking in the bucolic Welsh countryside, it came to her that she needed to reinforce her position as leader. She owed her people a chance to tell her just how much they were behind her and, therefore, she needed to hold an election.

That’s her take. I’m pretty sure what really happened was her political advisers (who are now scouring the Want Ads) showed her some charts and graphs illuminating her popularity and, more importantly, the unpopularity of her opponents. If she held an election, they told her, she could not help but gain enough seats in Parliament to make her a virtual dictator. And that she could not resist.

I hasten to add, this was not a bad call. She was, at the time, very popular, while the Labour party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, was in disarray. Additionally, UKIP had made itself redundant, the Liberal Democrats had made themselves irrelevant and the Green Party, bless them, still held only one seat. So it looked like clear sailing toward a Parliament with a huge Conservative majority.

And her strategy was sound: all she had to do was nothing. If she did nothing, she eliminated the risk of committing a gaffe in front of her electorate; she left that to her opponents.

Unfortunately, she did nothing poorly.

The first nothing she did poorly was not reach out to the 48% of the voting public who didn’t want Brexit. In all her “Strong and Stable,” “Will of the People” leadership speeches, she totally ignored half of the population. This made her look less like a leader and more like the head of a cult.

She then refused to take part in any debates. This made her look less like a leader and more like someone afraid to, well, take part in debates.

During her few appearances on talk shows, she pointedly avoided answering questions, and not in the skillful way most politicians handle prevarications, but in a ham-fisted, awkward manner. This made her look less like a leader and more like someone with something to hide.

She tried to make up for this by going out and meeting “the people,” but it soon came to light that the people she was meeting were hand-picked supporters, herded together to make them look like a huge crowd when, in fact, there were only about thirty of them. This made her look less like a leader and more like a charlatan.

Ms May Rally -- the tight shot.

Ms May Rally -- the wide shot
These meetings were held in secrete locations and carefully orchestrated, and if a real reporter turned up, she would simply leave. This made her look less like a leader and more like a coward.

But even with all this against her, she remained confident that, when the people went to the polls, they wouldn’t have much of a choice, but then something as miraculous as it was unanticipated happened: Jeremy Corbyn started acting like a leader.

The often confused-looking, bearded man in the dowdy jumper started holding rallies, and speaking his mind, and people flocked to him—lots of people, not just a handful squeezed together to imitate a crowd. And as his popularity grew, hers shrank.

The old Jeremy Corbyn

The New Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn Rally -- no trickery here.
This was happening when we left for the States, but the popularity gap was still so wide that we told our friends the best we could hope for was a slightly increased majority.

Then, as we rode home from the airport this morning—after 12 hours of radio silence—Tony, our loquacious driver, filled us in on the astonishing details:

The Conservatives lost 13 seats, the Labour gained 30.

The Conservatives are still the largest party, but with only 318 seats, they do not have enough to form a government.* It was, as someone pointed out, “A humiliating victory.”

And it gets better. I have just heard that, in order to retain her tenuous grasp on power, Ms May has been forced to cobble together a coalition government with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (DUP), a splinter party with roots in religious fundamentalism who espouse some rather unpopular views.

It looks like we’re in for an interesting ride, so hang on tight.


* For my American friends, a quick primer on UK elections. To put it into US terms, imagine you don’t actually vote for President. Instead, you vote for your state senators. When all the senators have been elected, they count them up, and the party with the most senators gets to have their Head Senator as President. The catch is, to effectively run a government, you would need to have 51 Senators of the same party holding the majority, otherwise, all your legislation would get voted down. That’s what happened in the UK just now. Ms May needed 326 seats but she only got 318.

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